There are moments in your past that shape our vision. Experiencing my childhood photo albums, I catch a look at Anna during the early grades, a quiet girl who, if she remained as alive, won’t discover how even during grade 4, she was pointing the right way to freedom of expression. There’s a lesson here that comes in handy for moms and dads and grandparents.
I’ve often wondered if Anna’s life might have taken another turn had she lived her early grades from the sixties when the ballpoint pen, replacing the fountain pen, dispensed if you use ink blotters in class. Children of the fifties, we learnt writing the hard way–with steel-nibbed pens which we dipped in ink pots and which invariably turned the writing experience in to a mud-bath. It took us months to understand the skill of compromise: speed meant accidental globs and splotches; if you wanted to save time, you’d be far wiser to experience the tortoise.
But Anna was not turtle. Her mind moved quicker than light; she was figuring ways to Bali if we remained as stuck from the grade 3 reader; from the fourth grade, when folks with older siblings counseled me agog over Elvis, she might find no more passionate than Japanese prints.
From the Sister Mary Michael, the composition teacher in grade 4, who told us that writing was an act of God which the writer would find his share of godliness from the holy trinity of pen, paper and blotter. From the three, the blotter was one of the most indispensable. “Why?” we asked. “Good writing is determined by the method that you control some of it.” There was much else that must be controlled as well, based on Sister Mary Michael. Reading Anna’s essay on why she liked chocolates, Sister became very still and angular. She peered down on the child, her eyes blue and difficult above her spectacles. “Too many adjectives,” she snapped. “Too many words!”
When Anna checked out her, unmoved, Sister retrieved her pen. The nib drew an easy, thin line over Anna’s script; the blotter followed; there came more red lines, more words slashed away.
I watched Anna after she returned to her desk. She began writing, dabbing the blotter after her pen in true Sister Mary Michael fashion. For quite a while, it seemed that Anna had learnt her lesson. However, if I peered more closely over her shoulder, I remarked that it absolutely was the blotter which was absorbing her interest. She had dribbled an area at the top right-hand corner from the sheet; she stuck the nib in the heart of the area and watched the darkness grow; a number of details with the nib and also the blotch had been a piece of chocolate, its center dissolving in to a hole. Fascinated, I watched her work more blotches for the absorbent paper and much more dabs until the entire blotter become a type of chocolate swiss-cheese.
Beyond her desk came more blotter sheets. Instead of holes, she made lines this time around, dark molasses lines dribbled and dripped almost spider fashion from one corner to the next; she paused just long enough to thicken the center stretch acquiring to break the flow until the entire sheet became criss-crossed with tubes of varying lengths and widths and also the blotter sat on her desk being a chocolate web.
It turned out an earlier version of Blotter Art, so distinctive it made hair climb onto end. But Sister Mary Michael cannot quite see that.
For details about Blotter Art take a look at this internet page: look at this
